Re: Basic Pot Odds, how to explain to someone who doesn\'t agree?
Your friend is clearly wrong.
If we are talking about the price of calling someone down and taking into account the bets on multiple streets... that is one thing. Say you decide on the flop that you are calling all the bets to showdown. Sklansky calls this effective odds and talks about it in Theory of Poker. Maybe this is what your friend is trying to convey...
However, being on the end faced with a decision to call a bet to win the pot is not the same thing. We are looking at this one decision at this point in the hand...It's simple math: what we stand to win (the pot) vs. what we stand to lose (one more bet) compared to our estimated chances of winning. The money in the pot is no longer ours and is irrelevant...it does not affect the math involved with our river decision. It's simply pot odds vs. our chance of winning. This is also discussed in TOP. I do not know of a clearer way to present it.
|